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Becoming involved as a Secondary School

WHY GET INVOLVED IN SCHOOL DIRECT?

Traditional Core PGCE

Traditionally if you receive a standard core PGCE student from a university, you will not have selected the trainee and the trainee will not have selected you. The trainee will be with you for a ‘placement’ and during this time may be in school for certain days and out at the university for others.

You are likely to receive money from the university for accepting this student. The amount of money will vary depending on the university but it is likely to be about £500. You may take two such students across the year, one on their first placement and one on their second placement, so perhaps you may receive approx. £1,000.

Many schools take these students with a view to perhaps employing them as NQTs the following year, but there is limited choice for schools because you do not choose the trainees in the first place and the ‘fit’ between trainee and school may not be ideal. If you did want to employ the trainee, you still need to advertise and interview for the position.

School Direct

School Direct was set up to overcome some of these limitations. Using the central administration of the Teaching School, WLTSA partners with a number of universities and supports primary and secondary schools to empower them to recruit their own trainees. We set up UCAS, market your programme and provide interview questions but you can shortlist and interview trainees in your school. If after the training year, you wish to retain your trainee as an NQT, you can do so seamlessly without the need for any advertising or interview process, because you selected and interviewed the trainee already.

There is however no compulsion on you to retain the trainee. If you have no vacancy at the end of the training year, or for whatever reason cannot retain your trainee, that trainee could also be employed with no further competitive interview by any other WLTSA partner school because they are a WLTSA trainee. This also therefore give you access to a potential pool of NQTs.

You could also take on teaching assistants or learning support assistants, with a specific plan to then train them to be teachers after a year or so. You can use School Direct to train your own staff but can also use it to recruit trainees from outside your school

You can choose salaried or unsalaried School Direct.

For an unsalaried trainee you would receive

£2,125 if you choose a St Mary’s programme

£1,125 if you choose a Roehampton programme or

£1,125 if you choose a UCL programme

For a salaried trainee we receive funding from EFA and pass most of it to you to subsidise the salary

See further details about how this works by clicking the tabs on the left.